Headlines

Monday, May 7, 2012

British Scientists Say Dinosaurs Farted Their Way To Extinction

British scientists have concluded that what made the dinosaurs extinct might not have been an asteroid, but rather their remarkable ability to pass gas
– and lots of it.

Researchers at Liverpool John Moore's University
prepared a computer model to determine how much methane gas would have
been produced by the class of dinosaurs known as sauropods – the
massive, lumbering, plant-eaters that included brontosaurus and
brachiosaurus. They looked at how much methane cows produce each day and
extrapolated that to dinosaurs that weighed as much as 90 tons and ate
hundreds of pounds of leafy greens every day. The team found that it's
likely that sauropods produced thousands of litres of methane gas each
day, meaning that they basically farted form sunrise to sunset.

When multiplied by the entire sauropod population during the Mesozoic
era, some 150 million years ago, the amount of methane produced each
year was estimated to be somewhere in the neighbourhood of 520 million
tons a year. That's 20 million more tons of the greenhouse gas than we
produce each year, leading the researchers to wonder if such prodigious
amounts of rear-end symphonies could have sped up climate change. Given
that the planet's average temperature was about 10 degrees C warmer back
then than it is today, the researchers suggest that the dinosaurs
contribution to methane levels in the atmosphere could have led to
long-term temperature increases and hence, threats to their existence.

While this study does appear in the vaunted pages of the journal Current Biology,
it's also far from definitive proof that dinosaurs basically farted
themselves to death. But the study's conclusions do raise important
questions about what role animals play in climate change – after all,
cows produce about 100 million tons of methane a year. But whatever you
take from this, just don't think that holding it in is going to save the
planet.